In 2023, if you’re seeking the most effective SEO audit methods, you’ve landed in the right place. This article will guide you through fundamental approaches to performing an SEO audit. With the ease of creating and launching websites today, the competition to improve your web page’s visibility to search engines is fiercer than ever.
Conducting regular SEO audits has become crucial. Hidden issues on and off your website may be undermining your rankings. To optimize your website’s performance, conducting a comprehensive SEO audit every six months to a year is advisable. Please explore our in-depth guide below for a detailed walkthrough on executing an SEO audit for your website.
For those well-versed in SEO, you’re likely familiar with various tactics to enhance your website’s search engine rankings. In addition to creating compelling content, taking a few essential steps is necessary to elevate your content’s search engine ranking.

Tools for an SEO Audit

Several paid tools are available for SEO audits, such as AHrefs, SEMrush Site Audit Tool, and Screaming Frog. These excellent tools provide extensive insights into your website’s SEO performance. Most of them also offer some form of a free trial period.

However, it’s entirely possible to conduct an audit using the tools provided by Google manually. These include:

1. Google Analytics
2. Google Search Console
3. Google PageSpeed Insights
4. Google Structured Data Testing Tool

With these tools, it’s time to embark on your SEO audit. We’ll delve into each step you must take to achieve the best results.

1. Make Sure Google Indexes ONE Version of Your Website

First, it is vitally important to make sure that Google can only index one version of your website to avoid duplication penalties. Duplicate sites can be easily created as there are several different ways to write a web address.

There are at least four options that you could choose to type into the browser.

They are:

• https://domainname.com
• https://www.domainname.com
• http://domainname.com
• http://www.domainname.com

Only one of these options should be accessible, and all other variations should be redirected to the canonical version. This can be accomplished through a 301 redirect.
If someone attempts to access your site’s HTTP version while the redirect is active, it will automatically reroute them to the HTTPS version. From the user’s perspective, nothing will visually change on the page except for the URL in the browser. Implementing this redirect to the HTTPS version of your site can enhance trust with search engines and potentially lead to a slight improvement in your rankings within the search engine results pages (SERPs).

2. Check to See If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly

In a digital landscape where over 90% of users browse the internet on mobile devices, ensuring your website’s mobile-friendliness is crucial.
A website that isn’t mobile-friendly can lead to issues such as improper display of web page elements, inaccessible buttons, and text that becomes too small to read comfortably. These issues collectively contribute to a subpar user experience and can result in search engine penalties.
You can use tools like the Mobile-Friendly Test to assess your website’s mobile-friendliness. Input your website’s URL; the tool will evaluate your web page. If it needs to be more responsive across a wide range of mobile devices, it’s imperative to invest in a mobile-friendly solution promptly.

3. Confirm That Your Site Uses HTTPS

As mentioned earlier, ensuring that your website utilizes the secure internet protocol HTTPS is crucial. Unlike HTTP, where data is transmitted in plain text and vulnerable to interception, HTTPS encrypts and secures it, making it a ranking factor.
Once your website adopts the HTTPS domain, you and your visitors will notice a small green padlock icon next to the domain name in the browser, signifying a secure and encrypted connection.

4. Check Google for Indexation Issues and Fix Them

If Google doesn’t index your website, it won’t appear in the search engine results pages—plain and straightforward. To check your indexed pages in a live environment, use Google itself. Type “site:yourdomainname.com” into the search engine. This query will display search results containing only the pages from your site that have been indexed.
If the search returns no results, your website isn’t receiving organic traffic from search engines. In such cases, examine your robots.txt file for potential crawl blocks and eliminate any unintended “noindex” tags from your page headers.

5. Speed Up Your Site

Site speed has served as a Google ranking signal for quite some time. Sluggish websites can lead to user frustration and subpar search experiences, whereas faster-loading sites tend to achieve higher rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Google provides a PageSpeed Insights Tool to assist you in analyzing pages that may not be performing optimally. Additionally, paid tools like Pingdom can offer even more insights.
Once you identify pages with slow loading times, it’s crucial to take action by optimizing content, rectifying any buggy code, and addressing unoptimized images that may be contributing to the issue.

6. Find and Delete “Zombie Pages”

Zombie pages can manifest in various ways, representing pages on your website with minimal to no traffic or those that search engines cannot index.

These often include:

1. WordPress category and tag pages
2. Archive pages
3. Pages with thin content
4. Outdated and irrelevant press releases
5. Boilerplate content, typically linked from the footer

When you spot these types of pages in the Google Search Console, deciding their fate is essential. If they no longer provide any value to your site, the best course of action is to delete or enhance them.

7. Clean Up Your Sitemap

Your website’s sitemap is a navigational guide for search engines and users. Search engines rely on sitemaps to discern the most significant pages on your site.
HTML sitemaps are designed to aid users’ navigation and offer a visually appealing experience. Ensuring that your sitemaps are user-friendly, easy to comprehend, and faithfully represent your site’s structure is crucial. Landing pages should be identifiable for users and crawlers, promoting efficient navigation.

8. Improve Your On-Page SEO

This is significant and should constitute a substantial part of your technical SEO audit checklist. However, optimizing every page on your site at once might be impractical, especially if your site is extensive.

Instead, take a deliberate approach by focusing on the top five pages that your regular visitors encounter. These pages may already have decent rankings but need more potential for improvement.

Concentrate your efforts on three key areas of enhancement:

1. Ensure the targeted keyword is included in the title tag and within the initial 100 words of the content.
2. Implement a structure comprising five internal and five external links on the page.
3. Incorporate the targeting of long-tail keywords.

Even this modest on-page optimization can hold significant potential for enhancing your search engine ranking outcomes. Apply this strategy to as many pages as you can over time, allowing you to monitor and measure the improvement in your rankings.

9. Check that Keyword Rankings are Heading in the Right Direction

First and foremost, if you haven’t already, it’s crucial to establish keyword rank tracking for your website. Several excellent tools offer this service, with SEMrush being a standout option.
Configure your chosen tool to monitor the keywords you’re targeting on your pages. Ensure that your rankings exhibit an upward trajectory as you make on-page SEO adjustments. If your rankings need to be improved, be prepared to modify your on-page strategies accordingly.

10. Analyze Your Backlink Profile

Backlinks linking to your website remain a top-ranking factor. Backlinks have held this critical role since the early days of the Google algorithm: the more high-quality domains that reference your site, the better your search engine rankings.
Therefore, your SEO audit checklist should comprehensively review your backlink profile. Once again, tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush can be invaluable for this task. Pay particular attention to your Domain Authority, a numerical rating assigned to your site based on the quantity and quality of inbound links.
It’s crucial to disavow any harmful links originating from sites with deficient domain authority, as these can hurt your Domain Authority score. Remove spammy links whenever possible and actively cultivate high-quality links to your content.
Remember that high-quality content naturally attracts backlinks, so prioritize creating informative and valuable content to foster a healthy link profile.

11. Fix Broken Links

Broken links will provide a better user experience and prevent the crawl from failing on parts of your website. Ensure that both internal and external links are still reaching their destination to ensure the link juice is flowing.

Screaming Frog is an excellent tool for finding broken links. You should check links on your website every month and fix any that have broken.

12. Check for Duplicate and Thin Content

Content that consists of less than 100 words typically needs help to index effectively with search engines. Unless these pages offer exceptional value to users, it’s advisable to either enhance or remove them.
Aim to ensure that your articles and blog posts reach a minimum length of 500 words. Additionally, be cautious about redundant content that serves solely to inflate your rankings artificially. Google can identify duplicate content and may penalize such pages.
Consider adding a comprehensive content audit to your SEO audit checklist. Regularly assess all the content on your website to ensure its quality is top-notch. Analyze what your competitors are covering and adapt similar content ideas, but elevate your version by delivering ten times the value through additional insights and valuable information.

SEO Audit Final Thoughts

The abovementioned techniques represent fundamental principles for conducting a technical audit to optimize site content according to SEO standards. These strategies, while straightforward, are highly effective for enhancing your website’s visibility.
Achieving high rankings for web pages in today’s competitive landscape is an intense endeavor. To gain a competitive edge, you must exhaust every opportunity, especially when numerous others offer similar services.
While creating exceptional content is the initial step, conducting regular SEO audits to monitor your site’s performance in search engine rankings is equally crucial.
If you require assistance running an SEO audit on your website and uncovering its advantages, please visit our services page to explore how we can assist you.